X-Ray Vision

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A power that lets one see through almost anything. It can usually be turned on or off at will, and the objects that you can see through and how far you see through them vary.

How the power actually works, especially if it's implied to be actual X-rays, is confusing. Whether your eyes or your glasses are sensitive to X-rays, you would still need a powerful X-ray source on the other side of whatever you were trying to see through, and even then you'd only see things that were X-ray opaque. Presumably you'd "see" things thus revealed in a "colour" for which we normal, X-ray-blind people have no name.

X-ray scopes, goggles, visors and what-have-you are perennially popular items in video games. Sometimes this has unintentionally humorous effects, as when some character's repel-everything super armor turns out to be completely radiotransparent, allowing you to see his/her skeleton beneath.

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In the real world, there is a technology called "X-ray backscatter imaging" which allows for a certain amount of selective viewing. However, it requires bulky beamshaping equipment around an X-ray tube, which is of considerable size, not counting the high-voltage power supply and water-cooling system to keep from melting the tube's cathode. And then you have to scan the beam across the target, and use large and heavy detectors to pick up the extremely faint backscattered X-rays. The smallest mobile X-ray backscatter (not counting "portal"-style backscatter machines, which can cheat in a number of ways) machine is built into a 20-foot shipping container. It isn't impossible to miniaturize a backscatter machine, but it would take a whole lot of really surprising breakthroughs in a whole lot of scientific fields.

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Also, all those X-rays would kill most people due to all the exposure to that much radiation. Given this, the common usage of X-ray vision for voyeuristic purposes has even worse implications than invasion of privacy—it's downright dangerous to the people who are being ogled.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

In Akame ga Kill!, the Ax-CrazySerial Killer Zank the Beheader has several vision powers, including X-Ray Vision. He uses it to see Akame in her underwear while fighting her, but he only comments that she doesn't have any concealed weapons.

Some kinky Fan-Art for Dennou Coil tends to reverse this, using the city's augmented reality glasses to cover some streaking girls — that is, the girls are using augmented reality to make them look like they're wearing clothing to anyone wearing the AR glasses (i.e., everyone), when in reality they're, er, not. This means that to see "through" clothing, you have to take the glasses off.

An example from Siraha and another from Kakkii here (and see-through here with Barbie Doll Anatomy underneath) — mostly tame pictures, but definitely a NSFW website. This has even gained it's own tag on the Danbooru system — "Reverse X-Ray".

Some Doraemon's gadget have this functionality. For example, the "Xyz Light Camera" can be used to see the contents of objects, similarly to an x-ray.

In High School DXD, when Issei gains an ability called "Penetrate", which is normally used to allow his attacks to pierce any barrier, he promptly applies it to his own eyes so he can look through girls' shirts.

Kogarashi's "Maid Guy Scan" ability in Kamen no Maid Guy. He does use it to see through girls' clothes, but only with good intentions...such as telling his master, Naeka, that she needs to lose some weight. Nobody really likes it when he does this.

Particularly because the ONLY people he really uses this is on women.

An episode of Lupin III (Red Jacket) has a woman named Nova and a scientist invent a special eye drops that let the user see through any surface with complete clarity. Nova gives it to Zenigata; he and his policeman discover also the potential of the invention on Nova herself and Fujiko later.

Characters with the Byakugan power in Naruto (Hyuuga family members) have general all-purpose awesome vision, including the ability to see people through objects. Used mostly to see chakra lines, it's also been shown to allow vision of a person's skeletal structure, and fans have speculated that it might have... other advantages (and disadvantages).

Natsume from Night Raid 1931 mostly uses his ability to scout or see through rooms in spy missions. The power and distance is affected by moon phases — it is at its weakest in the new moon.

Viola from One Piece. She ate the Giro Giro no Mi (Glare-Glare Fruit), which allows her to not only see through peoples' clothes and skin, but into their minds, as well. She also can see things from all the way across an entire island as well as being able turn her tears into large, hot iron whales to attack her opponents (because of a pun in Japanese).

One chapter of To Love-Ru has Rito put on a special pair of glasses that Lala uses to work on her inventions. As this is To Love Ru, we get to see "Rito Vision" of various girls in their lingerie. At one point, he accidentally adjusts the intensity, which renders them totally nude after that. He also gets some fan disservice, because those glasses allow to see through male clothing as well. Near the end, Rito somehow ended up under Run's groin, and she sneezes and transforms into Ren in which Rito commented 'has become something much worse' and he passed out.

Again in an extra chapter of sequel "Darkness". Thanks to one of Momo's plants, Rito becomes a pervert and grabs the glasses which allows him to see through clothes of many girls until he is stopped by Momo.

When Shiki in Tsukihime concentrates in the right way, he can see through things like skin in order to 'kill' tainted blood as it moves through his veins. Doing this too hard leaves him almost entirely blind for a period, during which all he can see are lines and points of death.

Comic Books

Proto-Superhero Olga Mesmer, The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes, appeared in a pulp magazine comic strip from 1937-1938. Although lacking a secret identity, she had Super Strength as well as X-ray vision, so is sometimes considered a precursor to Superman.

Comic book Superman looks at a wall and sees Lois, in natural colour, tied up behind it. Or he sees a bomb inside a ship that he's swimming past. Apparently, his eyes emit something that goes right through masonry or steel, but bounces off skin, clothing, dynamite, etc. at wavelengths that look just like ordinary light. However, like real X-rays, it's stopped by sufficiently dense materials (although, Pre-Crisis, only lead stopped it).

One Hand Wave for this is that it's not X-rays, but actually a combination of his telescopic vision and microscopic vision; he looks between the molecules of whatever he's looking through. To which those with even a passing understanding of what makes an object opaque in the first place will say: No.

It could also be a completely different wavelength of light, or not vision based at all (a la daredevil) but its being rendered as vision because thats what human readers would identify with.

Another ties into the "psionic Superman" explanation that was quite popular a couple decades back (and which seems to have influenced the John Byrne reboot).

Another post-Crisis theory says that he can detect the minor electromagnetic energy emitted when cosmic ray particles pass through matter, and his brain just interprets it as a visual image subconsciously constructed from the energy patterns. These emissions might be partially blocked by lead (or any sufficiently dense material).

However, in The Golden Age of Comic Books and at least part of The Silver Age of Comic Books, it was definitely X-rays. In fact, this is where his heat vision originally came from; he was able to focus the X-rays enough to cook whatever he was looking at. Or in one Superboy comic, turn gold into lead. One odd side-effect of this was that, until the Post-Crisis reboot, his heat vision couldn't melt lead. (This ignores the fact that an actual beam of highly focused X-rays could in fact melt lead, if it were sufficiently intense.)

Superman: Secret Identity is a Reconstruction or one extended This Is Reality take on Superman, and it approaches this power the same way: he only uses it on humans when he really, really needs to, because while he doesn't know exactly how it works, he's aware that blasting people with X-rays would be very bad for them.

In Krypton No More, Superman uses his X-Ray vision to scan an enemy and figure out a way to beat him. Later on, his X-Ray vision warns him that he mustn't fly in his apartment through a window because Lois Lane is inside.

In her first appearance (Action Comics #252) she practices her X-Ray vision, focusing the X-rays enough to generate heat and fix her bedroom's cracked mirror, and later watching through the walls of the Midvale's orphanage.

In a hilarious scene of Superman: Brainiac, Supergirl meets Cat Grant and accidentally reveals that her boobs are fake when she naively says out loud that "My X-ray vision is picking up some weird plastics in your —"

In the first scene of Supergirl Vol. 1 #1, Supergirl uses her X-Ray vision to see through several walls and an envelope and read a letter.

Ultra Boy of the Legion of Super-Heroes originally had this as his only power, but was later upgraded to "Any of Superman's powers, but only one at a time".

Note that originally the wrinkle was that he could melt lead, unlike Superboy (see above), which humorously led some writers to have him do nothing but melt lead just to drive the point home.

British juvenile comic character X Ray Specs sometimes sees other people as skeletons, sometimes not. Sometimes he sees the crucial thing at the right time, sometimes not.

Ray's specs had an interesting power if he looked through the front of the lenses: he could then see, for example, a skeleton as it looked when it was alive. In other words, a sort of reverse x-ray.

DC Comics character 'Hitman' tried out for the Justice League once and was rejected. He said that he hadn't expected to get in, he just wanted to get a look at Wonder Woman with his X-Ray Vision. He left with a leer.

Empowered's supersuit has "imaging functions" which, among other things, grants her this power. It's detailed enough to detect an aneurysm in the head of the Punch-Clock Villain who was guarding her, which saves his life.

One character in Target Comics, the White Streak, had x-ray vision.

An extremely disturbing use in Supreme Power where Mark Milton goes to a strip club, takes a woman home, and has sex with her - while having his x-ray vision on enough to see her bones and muscles beneath the skin. Mark also used to use it to spy on girls in high school.

A pair of x-ray-specs is the first of his parents' gadgets that Chase finds in Runaways. Naturally, he realizes what they do by seeing Nico and Karolina in their underwear.

What is it, Chase?

What do those things do?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

The protagonist of Strontium Dog is able to emit α particles from his eyes, which somehow allows him to see through walls and metal.

α particles are helium nuclei and can be stopped by paper.

In Superboy and the Ravers it's revealed that two of D.C. Force's family members have a variation of x-ray vision. One of them is a surgeon and the power comes in handy when trying to patch up metahumans with strange alterations of the regular human physique.

Last Child of Krypton: Shinji has X-ray vision thanks to his Kryptonian DNA. He has to remind himself to NOT look at Asuka's room when she's changing clothes lest he sees through the walls accidentally.

Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton: Asuka has X-ray vision due to being half-Kryptonian. She discovers this power when she accidentally looks through several walls... and sees Shinji half-naked. Cue blushing.

In Power Girl fic A Force of Four, Kara uses her x-ray vision fairly often to scan her surroundings looking for missing allies, enemies or weapons.

Kara Zor-L stepped in, her footsteps echoing within the enclosed space. She began to use her X-ray vision on the structure, peering within its walls to see if she could detect the glowing, green, deadly mineral, or an enclosure of lead which would block her vision and probably indicate Kryptonite's presence.

But she felt it was time to breach etiquette and turn her X-ray vision on Buffys valise. Linda gave it a casual glance. She couldnt stop her eyes from widening when she did. Buffy caught it. "Something wrong, Linda?" Linda Danvers struggled to maintain her composure. "Oh, nothing. Nothing, Buffy. Just mustve been some indigestion from dinner. You sure that you want me to leave you?" [...] "You, too." Linda went to the elevator and got in. Shed have to make a show of things, but there was no way she was leaving the area. Super-vision could help her keep track of Buffy Summers, even 108 stories up, even through stone and steel. Anybody who carried wooden stakes, silver crucifixes, garlic, and a fifth of unusual water in her valise wasnt an Outfit bagwoman. But shed still bear watching.

Stepping into the Common Room, Katherine spied no one. An ominous sign, she thought, but stilled her unease quickly. There was enough to fret over without inventing things, that was certain. She thought to peer about with her x-ray vision, but then reconsidered. More than once, as a young girl learning to use her burgeoning powers, she had found the results of such uninvited intrusion to be—well—highly embarrassing. One of the things that she and her invalid brother Zor could still yet smile and joke about was her inadvertent pubescent sight of his first urgent, fumbling kiss with an equally awkward partner. He kept bumping Marisa's nose and she kept giggling.

How did one use x-ray vision? Did you have to squint, or call out a secret word mentally? Almost at the thought of it, he began seeing steel girders in frameworks, people in the rooms in front of him at various activities, a maid vacuuming a rug.

Prince Blueblood has mastered this spell. He mainly uses it to navigate tunnels and check who is knocking on his door. Yes, he has also used it to peep on girls.

Shining Armor briefly mentions Blueblood taught him this spell. Since he hasn't mastered it, he doesn't use it very often because it disturbs him to see bones and organs.

Film

In xXx, Xander has a pair of X-ray binoculars with a built-in digital camera which can see through anything from clothes to brick walls, depending on what the viewer focuses on.

The movie X! The Man With X-Ray Eyes. The main character takes eyedrops to increase the frequencies of light that he can see; he goes from seeing everyone with no clothes on to seeing organs to seeing skeletons to seeing a monster at the center of the universe. He attempts to stop it by gouging them out but in an alternate ending (which may or may not be an Urban Legend), he can still see.

RoboCop (1987) has a thermal scanner built into him that allows him to see through walls and identify targets. He only uses it in one scene, though.

In the Alterien series, Oberon discovered early on his ability to see through solid objects. There are no x-rays involved in an Alterien's ability to see through people and walls. Oberon calls it 3D sight.

The high spirits of Astral Dawn can see in a manner similar to x-ray vision. The high spirits don't see with physical eyes, but with their minds. This gives them the ability to perceive the world in many ways mortals cannot, including seeing through walls simply by imagining they aren't there.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. Young Bill recounts how Superman's x-ray vision isn't an actual x-ray, more of cross section, and how even that was useless for looking through women's clothing as breasts would be restrained by bras and other articles of clothing. Therefore Bill developed "Thundervision" which was able to loosen restrictive clothing while looking through it.

In the Lensman series of classic space opera, several extraterrestrial races (and all entities of sufficient mental development) have something called just the "sense of perception", apparently the author's take on the ultimate implications of Rhine's roughly contemporary ESP experiments. So P penetrates anything except thought-shields, to any depth the perceiver chooses to focus on, can take in detail down to the molecular level, and has range limited only by the mental capacity of the user. The Arisians, the Elder Race and ultimate mentalists of this background, routinely use their sense of perception to observe objects in other galaxies.

Smallville manages to use this properly. More or less. Clark's vision is indeed similar to X-rays, barring a few occasions involving girls' locker rooms which are mostly played for laughs. The lack of any kind of contrast invalidates it slightly, but it still makes more sense than the classic comic-book version.

In The Twilight Zone (1985) episode "The Leprechaun-Artist", some kids catch a leprechaun and force him to grant their wishes in exchange for freedom. One wishes for X-Ray vision. Of course, when he tries to see through girl's clothing, all he sees are their bones and organs, like a real X-Ray machine.

Similarly to above deconstructed in Dossier On Detective Dubrovsky. A psychic admits that he can see through things but when his female listener is disturbed (or aroused) by this prospective he sorrowfully assures her that instead of all the good parts he can only see bones, organs and the bowel's contents.

Justified in Intelligence. What Gabriel is actually doing is using the chip to interface with spy satellite telemetry and/or wireless-enabled security systems, which the chip and his brain render as the ability to see through walls. No satellite or camera and his sight's no better than an ordinary human's.

In Space 1889 a possible invention is a heavy, energy consuming machine that lets you decide what you want type of materials you want to see through.

A classic magic item in Dungeons & Dragons is the Ring of X-Ray Vision. Tends to traditionally come with complementary fan speculation how people in a fantasy setting would even know what x-rays are, but it does let its user see through walls and such. (Several detection spells are also frequently blocked more or less effectively by solid materials depending on their type and thickness, with lead usually being best and thus suggesting that, say, the magic used by a Detect Evil spell may also have some characteristics in common with "hard" electromagnetic radiation.)

Naturally, most superhero games feature this as a possible power, and usually as one that's treated as explicitly distinct from, say, clairvoyance. The Hero System has its generic "N-Ray Vision", Mutants & Masterminds lets you enhance a character's vision with "Penetrates Concealment", and so on.

Video Games

In World of Warcraft, engineers can make Gnomish X Ray Specs which can see through other players' clothes.

Armor, but not undergarments. Not that this helps much with the "GAAHH! NAKED DWARF!" reaction.

Metroid: Samus can gain X-ray vision as a powerup to let her see through false floors. In the Prime subseries she can also use this to find enemy weakpoints and track invisible enemies. Prime 3 lets you kill many tough enemies in a single blow if you find their weakpoint!

Also, one of the few somewhat realistic portrayals. X-ray vision mode is bright and white, similar to what X-ray scans look like, and is anything but regular-colored that someone like Superman sees in. You can also see the internal structure of things; like Samus's hand inside her Arm Cannon.

Done a bit better in the video game Goldeneye Rogue Agent with M.R.I. (Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This vision mode allows you to see the silhouettes of enemy (and allied) soldiers through walls in a vaguely transparent white, but no more detail than that. It still doesn't work like it should, though...

The video game NightFire has a blue tinted heat vision vision mode that gives enemy's silhouettes in misty red past obstacles. It works through solid stone walls and functions in ways typical of "x-ray" vision though.

Deus Ex and its sequel has a vision augmentation that allows first night vision and then the ability to see people and animals through walls as figures made of white smoke.

Batman: Arkham Asylum has 'detective mode' which lets you see enemies and NPC's as skeletons some distance away and through walls. It also shows important items and breakable walls.

Joker also has a pair of traditional X-ray glasses which he uses in the PlayStation 3-exclusive challenge missions. Lampshaded in Batman: Arkham Knight, where Aaron Cash's pre-recorded description of them in the GCPD evidence lock-up ("one pair of...actual X-ray specs") is clearly disbelieving.

Early in Quest for Glory II, you can buy a pair of "x-ray glasses" (shaped like funny nose glasses) from the magic shop. Putting them on does nothing but display the message "everything looks like you're looking through a veil" and cause the magic shop owner to laugh. This, however, is also a vague clue to an Easter Egg: near the end of the game, a young woman has to change her clothes and steps behind a gauzy veil that's "just opaque enough to keep any would-be peepers from seeing anything fun". Putting the glasses on at this point turns the veil completely transparent.

In Perfect Dark there is an item called the X-Ray Scanner that can see through walls. One of the weapons (the infamously overpowered FarSight) is a railgun with one of these scanners built into it.

''This amazing treasure lets you look through absolutely everything...which means that you end up seeing NOTHING AT ALL! Think about it. "

In Persona 4: Arena, Aigis has a sensor package that allows her to spot hijackers through an airliner hull and also tell that Naoto is a girl under her clothes.

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse gives Shantae the X-Ray Specs, which will allow her to look at the contents of the mummy sarcophagi without opening them and triggering their curse.

In Battle Zone 1998, the SITE Camera special weapon allows tanks to see through terrain, which is rendered in wireframe like the tank's Enemy-Detecting Radar. It is generally of dubious utility, as the radar can pick up most enemies from behind terrain cover. The SITE camera returns in the sequel as an ISDF-exclusive weapon.

In Snake Pass, Noodle can learn an ability called Snake Vision, which allows him to find collectibles by seeing through the environment and it can only be used when he isn't moving.

Web Comics

In Girl Genius the vision-augmentation helmet Agatha and Jiminez put together has "x-ray vision" as one of its many settings. It is one of the settings which make Jiminez able to see the mechanisms of a very fancy vault door which makes him and Aldin able to open it. The first time Jiminez switches through the different modes, he accidentally switches to X-Ray at the moment he... "looks" at fellow lady-adventurer Larana.

Engie: Didn't you notice the goggles we engineers are always using? Here, give it a try!

Waterworks: One of the abilities of Slick's diving suit. It's a little more realistic than usual; if there is no x-ray source in the vicinity, the suit releases a lot of x-rays to compensate, which tends to be harmful to all life in the vicinity.

This uses some kind of four-dimensional light, and he can control how far he sees. Great for voyeurism if you happen to be into women's cross-sections. Mitch isn't:

"I can't just look at the skin below the clothes. I can't just peel away layers like that. It's a focus depth thing. And people just look red on the interior. Icky red and other nasty colours. Watching blood circulate isn't fun, it's horrific."

In New Vindicators, a few characters have this power, including Sclera and Iris, brother and sister Neo-Sapiens with the power to see through anything. Unfortunately, they see through their own closed eyes, which led to early insomnia and their father would make them train in martial arts until they simply passed out from exhaustion.

At the Whateley Academy in the webfiction Whateley Universe, there's a boy code-named Peeper. His only power is the ability to stare at people and look through their clothes. Maybe he could do something interesting with locked boxes or what-have-you, but he's not interested. This makes him one of the most annoying pains on campus, as he's constantly annoying the hot girls.

Initially, he kept the nature of his power a secret, even denying it outright ("That would be... uh... horridly, painfully bad, wouldnt it?"); technically, it isn't 'x-ray' vision per se, but a form of psychic scrying, though the effect is the same. It is only after several girls set a magical trap for him (which projected an illusion of male genitals on them for anyone using a Esper ability to peer through their clothes) that word got around what he'd been doing for most of the school year.

In his combat final, we learn that he can also see through things like the fake rocks people use to hide door keys, so he can get into a lot of people's houses too.

Western Animation

Captain Hero in Drawn Together has this power. In one episode, he used it to spy on Foxxy, which resulted in her getting a brain tumor, since his X-ray vision actually produces radiation.

An episode of Futurama involves Bender using X-ray sunglasses to cheat at poker. He accidentally gives himself away when he tells one of his opponents that he has a tapeworm.

This is one of Stitch's abilities that involve his eyes. First seen using them in The Series episode "Clip" (when he scans the inside of Mertle Edmonds's house), his eyes glow green when he's using X-Ray Vision.

See-More, a H.I.V.E. Five villain in Teen Titans, has X-ray vision that lets him see through Starfire's clothes, which causes her to "cover" herself in embarrassment.

On ToddWorld, Vark the alien from Glick has three eyes, one of which is an x-ray eye, which makes him especially good at hide-and-seek.

The M-Ray Contact Lenses gadget on Totally Spies!, so-called because they were supposedly designed for seeing through metal, but could be used for seeing through anything, like brick or concrete, or even like telescopes for reading tiny writing from across the room.

In Total Drama World Tour,Gwen finds a pair of X-ray glasses in Cody's pocket; Heather mockingly says to use them to see what kind of underwear he's wearing. (Answer: he's not.)

Real Life

Adverts in comics for X-Ray Specs. Okay, any boy stupid enough to part with money in the hope of seeing through girls' clothes deserves to be ripped off, but shouldn't enough people have "seen through" this con by now and let the sellers go out of business?

You can buy those cheap in novelty shops. Yes, they still don't actually work, but then it's a novelty item, so you shouldn't expect too much.

Some apps for mobile phones feature the same thing, saying they'll convert the camera of your cellular into a X-Ray one. Same as per X-Ray goggles mentioned above. (The idea that a software application could 'convert' a camera to an X-ray device is totally ludricrous to anyone who understands how software and X-rays actually work, of course.)

Truth in Television. During the Cold War the KGB invented an X-ray device so powerful it could show the inside of a lock, enabling a safecracker to see the movement of the tumblers. Unfortunately the device emitted powerful bursts of radiation when being used — KGB agents would joke that you could tell a veteran safecracker by his lack of teeth!

You can't simply press a button on Photoshop to do this (yet), but you can do something similar if the subject in the photo is wearing light and thin clothes.

One reason that airport security scanning technology is controversial is that some versions, in scanning a would-be air traveler for concealed weapons, generate a solid-looking image of their body shape that's detailed enough to show breasts, buttocks, and hints of genitalia.

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